Park Maintenance Management: Playground Inspections and Work Orders on Your Phone

Illustration: how park maintenance runs in MaintainNow.

The free playground inspection checklist

Use this as your weekly walk-through. Follow the equipment manufacturer's instructions and your local playground safety standards for exact limits.

Every week

• Measure surfacing depth under swings, slides and climbers; rake loose fill back into place
• Check for loose bolts, sharp edges and protruding hardware
• Check swing seats, chains and hangers for wear
• Check slides and climbers for cracks and damage
• Check fencing and make sure self-closing gates close and latch
• Clear litter, broken glass and other hazards
• Rate the overall condition: good, fair (fix soon) or poor (close the area)

Around the rest of the park

• Walking trails and footbridges: boards, railings, erosion after storms
• Picnic shelters: tables, grills, roof, lighting
• Restrooms, drinking fountains and trash cans
• Irrigation, lawn and tree hazards
• Signs, benches and lighting along paths

Before and after

Without a system, playground inspections happen on paper clipboards that end up in a truck, and a worn swing chain reported by a parent might sit in an email inbox for a week. Nobody can quickly see which parks were inspected and what's still broken.

With MaintainNow, each park's inspections are scheduled, done on a phone and kept on the equipment's record. Anything that fails becomes a work order, and the park map shows where the open work is.

1. Build the playground checklist

In Checklist Templates, add a step for each item. Use Number for surfacing depth, Inspection Check for pass/fail items (PASS, FAIL or FLAG on the phone) and Multi Choice for the overall condition.

2. Schedule it every week

Add the park as a location and each play structure, footbridge and shelter as an asset. Then create a maintenance plan that repeats Weekly on the day you choose, attach the checklist and assign a crew member. They get a push notification and an email when each week's inspection is created.

3. Inspect on the phone

The crew member opens the inspection in the MaintainNow mobile app, fills in the checklist and saves it. They can also take photos with the phone camera and add them to the work order's Images.

4. Turn the failure into a repair

From the phone, they create a work order for the repair, linked to the same play structure, so the fix is tracked separately from the inspection.

5. See the whole park on a map

On the web, Floor Plans lets you upload a site map of the park and pin each asset on it. The Open Work Orders tab lists what's still waiting at that park. Floor plans are on the web only, not in the phone app.